It started like any other Wednesday, as tens of thousands of people arrived at airports around the country last week ready to take a Southwest Airlines flight to start a vacation, go see clients for business or simply get home to see their families.

But instead of the vaunted Southwest experience, these passengers encountered a travel nightmare, as a technical outage brought the Dallas-based carrier's network to a screeching halt.

By the end of last weekend, about 2,300 flights were canceled, affecting up to an estimated quarter of a million passengers.

What followed, according to inconvenienced passengers, were long lines, unclear communications, trips made by car instead of plane and in many cases, a night spent camped out at the airport.

There were reports of missed youth basketball tournaments and being late for the first day of work at a new job.

More than anything, it meant a lot of waiting.

"It was a mess. There were lines everywhere," said Brian Donnell, a Carrollton resident who was returning from Denver on Wednesday night after a vacation with his wife. After their flight was canceled, Donnell spent two hours in line waiting to get rebooked, while his wife sat nearby in pain after rupturing her Achilles tendon earlier in the trip.

"The computers would come back up and they'd get boarding passes for two or three or four people, then they'd go down again," said Donnell, who was able to make it out on an early Thursday morning flight to Dallas after a night spent at the airport. "I felt sorry for (the gate agents). Some people were irate."

Other passengers weren't able to wait for later flights and instead took matters into their own hands.

When she saw her flight to Denver early Friday morning was canceled, spillover from the disruption caused by the outage, Ashley O'Bannon McClain and her husband skipped the lines at Love Field and instead rented a car to make the 12-hour drive so they could catch her cousin's Saturday wedding.

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"It was tough, just to make the 12-hour drive. It was so unexpected and we were already lacking sleep," said O'Bannon McClain, whose father is a Southwest pilot. "I don't really hold anything against Southwest. They did try to fix it as quickly as they could. I just hope it doesn't happen again because it was definitely not easy on anyone involved."

Southwest has apologized repeatedly and profusely for the impact of the outage, which was blamed on a faulty network router and a back-up system that also failed.

The company's CEO Gary Kelly, as well as its chief operating officer and chief communications officer, all issued personal apologies. The company's customer relations team has also spent the past week emailing customers directly to apologize.

"This is not the kind of service that we're famous for at Southwest Airlines," Kelly said last week. "This is all on us."

He estimated the outage would cost the company up to $10 million in lost business.

In addition to giving refunds or allowing customers to rebook canceled flights at the same fare, Southwest is offering affected customers a 50 percent off voucher for a future round trip domestic flight.

That offer might not be enough to make up for the hassle and headaches caused by the outage to some passengers, scores of whom took to social media to vent at Southwest as their flights were canceled or they sat idly on the tarmac.

Janice Lauroesch had only flown a few times with Southwest before booking a trip to see her sick mother in California. Her return trip on Wednesday was canceled and when she was told it would be two days before she could get back to her home in Washington D.C. on another Southwest flight, she instead booked a ticket with a different airline.

"The communication in the terminal that day was horrible. Agents were getting snippy and frustrated. It's the company's fault. I'm not sure why they're getting frustrated with me," said Lauroesch, who's still waiting to have her flight refunded and isn't sure whether she'll fly Southwest again. "The problems just compounded and compounded."

Others took a more measured view of the situation -- mistakes happen, Southwest worked to fix the problem as quickly as possible and offered compensation to make up for it -- and even praised frontline employees who had to deal with the angry masses.

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"Their attitude was pretty good. They tried to do what they can but they're just the people on the front line. They're not in charge," said Steve Epps, who spent Wednesday night at Chicago's Midway Airport, where Southwest employees were handing out blankets to stranded passengers.

In this instance, Southwest's long track record of customer-friendly service paid off, as Epps and other frequent fliers said they were inconvenienced, but it wouldn't be enough to prevent them from flying with the airline again.

"It's rough, but it's not the worst I've faced when traveling. I've been stuck on a (different airline's) plane on the tarmac for nine hours," said Epps, a Dallas resident who flies Southwest as often as four times per month. "My wife was angrier than I was. She'd been looking forward to me getting home."